Last Sunday my wife and I attended a live eTown taping at the Boulder Theater featuring Nanci Griffith and Piers Faccini. It was a great concert, and personally not having really listened to either of these artists beforehand, I was very impressed. During of Nanci Griffith’s closing songs for her set, she’s singing about the radio, and at one point near the end says, “…Now that’s a real Clear Channel.” Obviously making a jab at our dear monopoly of the airwaves, Clear Channel Communications, Inc.

That got me thinking this morning about RadioIO and Internet radio in general. For many years now I have made an effort to avoid listening to broadcast radio. The commercials, the trendy music, the annoying DJs that laugh at their own jokes, the commercials… Being an early adopter of the Slim Devices Squeezebox music players, over the last few years, I have tapped into a whole (new) world of streaming Internet radio accessible through these players.

About RadioIO
RadioIO hosts what is probably my favorite set of streaming Internet radio channels. They feature around 22 channels of varying genre: Acoustic, Jam, Rock, Classical, World Disco, Edge, Eclectic, Beat, and many more. Heck, they even have a 24-hour a day Grateful Dead channel (RadioIODead), if you can’t get enough of that good ol’ Casey Jones, drivin’ his train, high on cocaine.

The beauty of RadioIO (and most Internet radio stations in general) includes:

• Few to no commercials - RadioIO toots its own horn for 30 seconds or so every couple of hours, but that’s about it (and the commercials aren’t obnoxious)
• They really do offer a diverse mix of music including independents, up-and-coming artists, ones you’ve never heard of, and the ones you’ve always heard of. So nice to hear new artists and new songs - diamonds in the (Clear Channel) rough, so to speak.
• No censorship of artists, types of music, or otherwise due to corporate mandate or the fact that the latest Britney Spears single is so popular with the fans that it “censors out” the entire body of music composition due to its incredibly high amount of airtime.
• No annoying DJs
• Free! Or at least very low-cost - Being a fan of RadioIO I’ve purchased one of their $50 annual SoundPass Memberships hoping to support the cause and keep it commercial free.

Streaming Internet Radio in General
RadioIO is but one of many options available in the Internet radio segment. Shoutcast provides about a bazillion different genre and music channels streaming to you from all over the world. Check out Folk Alley.Com for a little bluegrass/folk music and occasional music history lesson. Listen to public radio? Then choose pretty much any station across the nation, and stream it static-free from the Internet (We listen to KUNC.org broadcast from Fort Collins). There are so many options when it comes to Internet radio that my 81GB music collection has a pretty thick layer of dust on it now and is becoming rapidly obsolete.

Now, you say you can’t get Internet radio in your car? True, true, at least not yet. But until municipal WiFi comes to your location, load up your Ipod with some great music or a nice audiobook and tune out those “Clear Channels”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 5:55 am and is filed under Best of Tech, Disruptive Tech, Use and Recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.